Formalizing Informal Learning

Now, more than ever, leaders recognize the importance of employees’ contributions to their organizations’ performance. Forrester Research confirms this trend and the importance of having a knowledgeable and skilled workforce. This elevation in employee status is pressuring individuals to take personal responsibility for improving productivity, quality and customer satisfaction.

To complicate matters, rapidly evolving technology, increasing regulations, global competition and instant communications are making it more difficult for workers to keep up with the requirements of their jobs.

The Changing Workplace
Executives are turning to their chief learning officers to improve the competency and productivity of their employees, and the contribution they make to the organization’s performance. This ever-expanding responsibility is creating a new set of challenges for learning executives. What role should learning play in your organization? What elements should be part of a learning structure? How do you integrate informal with formal learning experiences? How would you model a learning environment based on your organization’s performance measures? What should your learning model look like? How do you know where to start?

Today, learning is viewed as a continuous cycle that includes both formal experiences (classroom and online courses) and informal experiences, such as collaboration, coaching, feedback and knowledge access. Informal learning takes place continually throughout every organization. The key to supporting performance demands is to capture, share and leverage this informal education.

Most organizations have systems in place to manage formal learning. Some also have implemented informal management systems for knowledge and virtual collaboration. But it isn’t enough to simply blend formal with informal learning experiences—they must be integrated.

What does integration mean? Informal learning is inherent in most organizations. It is the natural collaboration of people as they work and share knowledge and ideas. No system or learning model could or should formalize all organizational learning. How do you know what to capture? When the learning is repeatable by others and is important to the performance measures, it should be integrated with formal learning. That is, the learning should be captured, shared and leveraged, as well as managed and measured, as part of the formal learning program. The continuous learning model provides the blueprint for how this formalization and integration take place.